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129 D
129 D
Is there a difference between believing and merely under- in the broad and colloquial sense, involve both the mental
standing an idea?Descartes thought so. He considered the representation and the positive assessment o f meaningful
acceptance and rejection of an idea to be alternative out- information (for a review, see Bogdan, 1986).
comes of an effortful assessment process that occurs sub- A proposition is believed when the proposition's
sequent to the automatic comprehension of that idea. This meaning is represented, coded, or symbolized in a mental
article examined Spinoza's alternative suggestion that (a) system and when that symbolic representation is treated
the acceptance of an idea is part of the automatic com- as if it was true. It makes little sense to say that we believe
prehension of that idea and (b) the rejection of an idea something o f which we have absolutely no knowledge or
occurs subsequent to, and more effortfully than, its accep- which we, through our words and actions, acknowledge
tance. In this view, the mental representation of abstract to be false. Thus, to believe that armadillos have four
ideas is quite similar to the mental representation of phys- legs, for example, requires that one have the information
ical objects: People believe in the ideas they comprehend, armadillos have four legs coded and stored in one's mental
as quickly and automatically as they believe in the objects system and that one behave as though the information
they see. Research in social and cognitive psychology sug- correctly characterizes some real zoological state of affairs.
gests that Spinoza's model may be a more accurate ac- Whereas the representation c o m p o n e n t o f believing refers
count of human belief than is that of Descartes. merely to the existence o f meaningful information within
a mental system, the assessment c o m p o n e n t refers to the
relation between that information and other information
that already exists within the system.1
Though Truth and Falsehood bee Neare twins, yet Truth a little
elder is. The Cartesian Procedure
- - J o h n Donne, 1635/1930, p. 129 W h e n we think about how the h u m a n m i n d believes, it
Everyone knows that understanding is one thing and be- is only natural that we should immediately think about
lieving is another, that people can consider ideas without how it ought to believe. Because we c a n n o t actually ob-
considering t h e m so, and that one must have an idea be- serve the processes by which comprehension and assess-
fore one can determine its merit. "Everyone knows the m e n t occur, we tend to ask the next best question: H o w
d i f f e r e n c e . . , between supposing a proposition and ac- should they occur? W h a t is the most logical way for these
quiescing in its truth" (James, 1890, p. 283). Nonetheless, things to happen? H o w would we design a device to ac-
this article suggests that what everyone knows m a y be, at complish them? One piece o f the answer to such questions
least in part, wrong. It will be argued that the compre- is obvious and has been obvious for so m a n y centuries
hension and acceptance o f ideas are not clearly separable
psychological acts, but rather that comprehension in- t Such a "coherence theory" of truth is obviously inadequate: One
cludes acceptance o f that which is comprehended. may not define the veracity of a proposition exclusively in terms of its
fit with other propositions (see Tarski, 1969). Nonetheless, propositions
do (somehow) get assessed, and because the actual mechanics of the
The Process of Belief assessment procedure are not crucial to the present discussion, no at-
tempt to define its necessary and sufficient conditions will be made.
Components of Believing
The writing of this article was supported by National ScienceFoundation
"Believing," wrote Bertrand Russell (1921), "seems the Grants BNS-8605443 and BNS-8819836 to Daniel T. Gilbert.
most mental thing we do." (p. 231) Indeed, the problem So many people have provided kind and insightful comments on
versions of this article that I will surely fail to thank them all. Among
o f belief---what it is, how it happens, and what it d o e s - - them, then, are John Bargh, Roy Baumeister, Mark Bickhard, David
constitutes "the central p r o b l e m in the analysis o f m i n d " Cohen, Fred Dretske, Russ Fazio, Susan Fiske, Don Foss, Windflower
(Russell, p. 231). Exactly what does it m e a n to say that Gilbert, Nancy Hazen-Swann, Marcia Johnson, Ned Jones, Stan Klein,
we believe something? W h a t do we m e a n when we say Doug Krull, Mark Lopper, James Liu, Charlie Lord, Pat Malone, Brett
Pelham, Mike Ross, Johnathan Schooler, Dave Schneider, Jim Sherman,
we believe that bald m e n are especially licentious, that Janet Spence, Bill Swann, Romin Tafarodi, Elizabeth Tighe, Yaacov
sharks can swim backwards, or that love is blind and Trope, Barbara Tversky,Dan Wegner, Rich Wenzlaff,Tim Wilson, Jason
justice is not? The answers to these questions are so com- Young, the students in Susan Fiske's and Shelley Taylor's seminars on
plex and varied that no brief discussion can treat t h e m social cognition, and several anonymous reviewers.
fairly. Nonetheless, in all the epistemological talk that Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Daniel Gilbert, Department of Psychology,330 Mezes Hall, University
philosophers and psychologists have p r o d u c e d over the of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712. Electronic mail may be sent to
years, one point o f consensus seems to emerge: Beliefs, PSHU666@UTXVM.BITNET.
1
Acceptance
1
Unacceptance
1
Rejection
search shows that people often use information that they
clearly recognize as invalid. Ross, Lepper, and Hubbard
(1975) gave subjects feedback about their performance
on an ability-linked task (namely, the discrimination of
actual from bogus suicide notes) and later confessed that
the feedback had been unrelated to the subject's actual
performance. Despite the experimenter's confession,
Unacceptance subjects persisted in believing the invalid feedback. Sim-
ilar results have been documented with many different
kinds of invalid information (e.g., Anderson, Lepper, &
mains distinct and separate from comprehension (as it Ross, 1980; Valins, 1972; Walster, Berscheid, Abrahams,
does in the Cartesian system). & Aronson, 1967). Interestingly, one of the few effective
A hybrid "Cartozan" processor of this sort is illus- methods for ameliorating belief in such false propositions
trated in Figure 2. Such a system would display virtually is to ask subjects to comprehend the false proposition's
all of the effects documented hitherto. Specifically, the logical opposite (Anderson, 1982).
principle of premature output would cause such a system These findings fit with a larger body of research that
to show a bias toward accepting whatever propositions it suggests that people are particularly poor at ignoring, for-
assessed; however, the Cartozan system would not nec- getting, rejecting, or otherwise failing to believe that which
essarily assess those propositions it comprehended! In they have comprehended (Bjork, 1972; Schul & Burn-
short, the fact that assessment is asymmetric does not stein, 1985; Wyer & Budesheim, 1987; Wyer & Unverzagt,
mean that acceptance is an automatic consequence of 1985). Yet, in virtually all such investigations, subjects
comprehension. As such, the research discussed thus far have used information whose invalidity was revealed only
may impugn the Cartesian model, but by and large it after it was comprehended. Cartozan, Spinozan, and even
supports the Cartozan and Spinozan models equally well. Cartesian systems are all capable of displaying such ef-
The question then remains: Can mere comprehension fects. Spinozan systems are unique, however, in that they
occur? That is, can one understand a proposition without should occasionally believe and use information even
representing it as true? when they have prior knowledge of the information's in-
According to some theorists, the answer is by defi- validity.
nition no. Comprehension is the process by which the Wegner et al.'s (1985) extension of the Ross et al.
meaning of a proposition is mentally represented, and (1975) study suggested that being forewarned in this way
many theorists have found it difficult to define this process is not necessarily to be forearmed. Rather than confessing
without reference to the veracity of the proposition. Thus, to subjects after giving them phony feedback on a suicide-
Johnson-Laird (I 988) noted that to comprehend a prop- note detection task, Wegner et al. (1985) told subjects
osition one must "imagine how the world should be about the invalidity of the feedback before the subjects
granted its truth" (p. 110), and Dowty, Wall, and Peters received it. Despite this clear forewarning, subjects be-
(198 l) argued that "to give the meaning of a sentence is lieved the arbitrary feedback they were given (cf. Fleming
to specify its truth conditions" (p. 4). Rips and Marcus & Arrowood, 1979; Kiesler & Kiesler, 1964). Similarly,
(1977) were even more explicit in claiming that the com- Gilbert et al. (1990) showed subjects a series of smiling
prehension of a sentence involves "creating a temporary faces (i.e., icons of the proposition I am happy) and told
context in which the sentence is true" (p. 192). Indeed, subjects that each face was expressing either true or false
many of us feel that the meaning of an aphorism such as happiness. On some trials subjects received these assess-
oppression is the mother of liberty is not clear until we ments before seeing the face, and on other trials they
have represented the aphorism in a way that renders it received the assessment only after seeing the face. As the
true ("Ah yes--the yearning for freedom becomes acute Spinozan hypothesis predicted, resource depletion caused
when freedom is denied"). In some sense, to generate a subjects to misidentify false faces as true, but not vice
proposition's meaning is to consider it so. versa. Moreover, the timing of the assessment made ab-
Nonetheless, other theorists have offered definitions solutely no difference whatsoever. Resource-depleted
that preserve the possibility of mere comprehension. For subjects mistook false faces for true ones, and they were
1 18 F e b r u a r y 1991 • A m e r i c a n P s y c h o l o g i s t
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